exploratory kidnapping

[alicornucopia]

In this room are two women, one gray and sixty years old, one just thirty and red-haired, both wearing elaborate outfits. The younger casts a spell.

In this room is now also a third person. (On whom the elder woman promptly also casts a spell, which she had at the ready.)

Comments

[alicornucopia]

"I wonder if the process is lossy? Is some ialdae spending itself to move other ialdae to the wards to be sucked up?"

[missnicegirl]

"I'm not sure. And it might be hard to tell without clear measurements."

[alicornucopia]

"Quite." Kaylo taps his chin, then adds to the illusion: older ialdae should now look bluer. "I like the freeform-ness of this stuff, by the by, very nice."

[missnicegirl]

"It's convenient!"

The dots representing active ialdae output are yellow, and the oldest spots are blue, and the background fog is a uniform medium green.

"Hmm, it does look like there's something going on with the background."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah. Is that 'the fog sprang into existence halfway through the current lifespan of Elcenian ialdae' or 'it's a mix'..."

[missnicegirl]

"Or some combination of the two? Well, can we make the map show the past?"

[alicornucopia]

"Sure, why not. Past-scry the whole thing." Kaylo rewinds the illusion.

[missnicegirl]

The background fog, it turns out, sprang into existence - well, achieved its current density over the course of a few degrees - when someone, presumably Matilda, had just begun spewing enormous amounts of ialdae all over the bottom of the world opposite Paraasilan. But its current age-colour would suggest it's younger than that, so apparently it is also a mix.

[alicornucopia]

"Huh. So ialdae sometimes also teleports to destinations. It didn't travel from opposite Paraasilan to become a fog in Gibryel at its normal rate, that much is clear..."

[missnicegirl]

"I wonder why the background stuff behaves so differently?"

[alicornucopia]

"Good question. And we still don't know whether ialdae teleporting itself around is lossy or not - does the background fog mean there was more than this potentiated but then it got expended spreading itself around?"

[missnicegirl]

"I'm not sure. I'm also not sure how... big the background fog is. It's the same everywhere on the map, but the map is only as big as this planet."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah." Kaylo makes a separate illusion, this one of the moon.

[missnicegirl]

The moon has the same background fog as the planet, but no hotspots.

"Is that the moon?"

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah. And even farther away is -" He makes a sun illusion.

[missnicegirl]

It has background fog too.

"Is the background fog just everywhere? If that's the case, it's the opposite of lossy..."

[alicornucopia]

"It's not necessarily non-lossy, because we don't know where the initial burst came from. And just to be really sure, here's Avirber 6, one of the farthest other planets identified -" Kaylo makes an illusion of it. It's an octagon.

[missnicegirl]

It has background fog.

"So the background is either infinite or really really really big."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah. This is more than you spray around just by existing. Did the world catch ialdae?"

[missnicegirl]

"Maybe it did. That would sort of explain it."

[alicornucopia]

"And prompts a heck of a lot more questions than it answers. Can the world use the ialdae it has, and if so, under what circumstances might it do that? It doesn't seem to be holding onto it very hard, we can pick it up - can people take ialdae out of person ialders like that? Why does ialdae sometimes travel if it can move instantly? What would happen if we left these wards here for a century and they just kept eating apparently arbitrary amounts of background magic that entire time, would the structure of the spell hold or would something else happen?"

[missnicegirl]

"I'm not sure we are picking up the background fog, it's sort of hard to tell when it's so uniform. But those are all very good questions."

She looks over at the wards. Kaylo's is glowing merrily. Hers is still only visible to magic-sight.

"Which questions do we need to answer to make sure our wards work, though?"

[alicornucopia]

"If they're not picking up background fog, and they're only getting power from spills, we need to know how fast they're doing it and from how far away so we know if we can expect enough spills - especially since the Linnipese could probably invent their own recyclers if they tried. And whatever they're getting, we need to know how stably they can go on doing it, because that's relevant to any ward renewal schedule."

[missnicegirl]

"Well, if the wards are big enough to cover the whole country, we might be able to make them pick up spills from inside their active area and prevent anyone else from doing that and then people outside Esmaar wouldn't be able to interrupt our supply by building their own recyclers, and there are plenty of ialdic dragons living in Esmaar right now... And if it wasn't getting enough power, anyone with high output could sit inside it somewhere and deliberately spill power at it."

[alicornucopia]

"These wards are little; do you think country-sized ones won't be any more expensive? Also - it's fairly important to be able to put the wards down, or at least make them selectively ignore people. Otherwise they make it difficult to have tourism and go grocery shopping and so on. Need to build that in."